The show must go on

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
Hanging chads or no, the show must go on. Or so an 11-member
panel of the 9th Circuit Court has ruled unanimously on the California
recall election. The ACLU, the NAACP and other liberal Democratic front
groups must be gnashing their teeth. They hoped to derail the election and
save Gov. Gray Davis' job by arguing that minority voters would be
disenfranchised because some areas of the state use punch-card voting
systems similar to those used in Florida during the 2000 presidential
election. But the 9th Circuit En Banc Panel didn't buy the argument, thereby
overturning an earlier ruling by three of their colleagues.

The point of the ACLU's exercise wasn't merely to try to stop
the recall in California. With the pro-recall vote slipping by the day 
now down to 53 percent from 58 percent in the last statewide poll  and
Democrat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in the lead to succeed Davis, liberals may
not have much to worry about from the results of the election itself. But
their goal is much more ambitious.

Liberals want to convince voters that the only reason elections
don't always go their way is that nefarious forces  read, conservatives 
keep likely liberal voters from voting in the first place or having their
votes properly counted once they cast them. That's why liberals keep harping
on the "stolen" presidential election in 2000.

To hear liberals talk about it, you'd never know that every
single recount of the votes in Florida determined George W. Bush to have won
the state's 25 electoral votes and, therefore, the presidency. And that
includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a
consortium of news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, the
Boston Globe and the L.A. Times, among others.

As the New York Times reported on Nov. 21, 2001: "A
comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's
presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the
United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the
votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." But the
liberals still invoke their "stolen election" complaint at every turn, just
as they do their "disenfranchised voters" mantra.

If it's not punch-card voting machines or "butterfly ballots"
they're complaining about, it's restrictive voter registration laws. The
NAACP, for example, wants to "re-enfranchise" 4,000,000 felons who have lost
the right to vote because of their crimes. The group has made this one of
their top legislative priorities in recent years.

Some liberals would even like to extend voting privileges to
non-citizens. In the 1980s, the ACLU sued the U.S. attorney in San Francisco
because he matched voting records against lists of legal immigrants who were
not yet citizens. The ACLU argued that trying to determine whether
non-citizens were voting would serve a "chilling effect" on Mexican-American
voting overall.

What the ACLU was really worried about was that the process
actually uncovered thousands of non-citizens who had nonetheless voted in
federal elections. In 1996, a similar investigation unearthed hundreds of
non-citizens, including illegal aliens, who had voted in California's 46th
Congressional District. The non-citizens were registered thanks to the
efforts of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino voter registration group.
Yet when conservatives complain about such blatantly illegal tactics,
liberals scream "racism."

Liberals claim to want to count every vote and have every vote
count. But what they really want is to win at all costs, even if it means
passing out absentee ballots to incapacitated nursing home residents, or
giving away free cigarettes to vagrants if they'll follow campaign workers
to the polls and pull the Democrat lever (as Milwaukee TV station WISN
uncovered the Gore campaign doing in Wisconsin in the 2000 election).

If the liberals lose in California on Oct. 7, expect yet another
round of whining and claims that the democratic process has gone amiss. What
they really mean is that Democratic Party didn't win, despite all their
tricks.

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